On May 15, 1941, a woman named Anne mailed a picture postcard showing a color image of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., to the staff of the Newtown Centre Branch Library in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. “I couldn’t resist sending this. I hope you don’t mind. The weather’s grand so far,” Anne wrote. Eight years later, a man named Donald wrote a postcard to Mr. and Mrs. Walter Farrar in Huntington, Indiana, informing them that he was “Having a nice time [and was] ready to go to bed[,] short & sweet but to the point.” On the front of Donald’s postcard is a color image of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., with an American flag prominently flying in front of the building.
Figure 1: Folger Shakespeare Library postcard, from the author’s collection
Figure 2: Folger Shakespeare Library postcard, reverse, from the author’s collection
Figure 3: U.S. Supreme Court postcard, from the author’s collection
Figure 4: U.S. Supreme Court postcard, reverse, from the author’s collection
What did the recipients make of these postcards? If they had never been to Washington before, how might these images have shaped perceptions and expectations of the city? Today, when a casual researcher or hobbyist finds these two cards for sale at an antique store or in their local library, how could these images shape that person’s understanding of the city as it was in the past?
During the first half of the twentieth century, postcards were both kept as souvenirs and used as communication devices, functioning in a similar way to text messages or Instagram today. Bushels of them were produced by large companies and individual amateurs alike, and in 1913 the Post Office handled 968 million of them in 1913. Costing 1 or 2 cents to mail during our period, postcards were affordable mass commodities that circulated widely via the mail and which are still accessible in many public collections today. Scholars have analyzed postcards from art history, material culture, and communications standpoints.1 This project begins to explore how postcards shape memories and perceptions of geography in Washington, D.C., a particularly interesting city because it is both the nation’s capital, replete with government buildings and national monuments, and a residential city where locals live, work, and create community. How does the tension between the two manifest in postcard imagery?
I approach these questions by imagining what a modern-day researcher or hobbyist would encounter in the archive if they were conducting research on postcards. This is intended to be a pilot project which might be expanded to include other types of print images or more postcards in the future. For now, I pull a small sample of 115 postcards created or mailed between 1900 – 1950 from several local collections. Next I geocode each postcard based on the written caption and/or pictorial focus of their image and map the cards to the city using Leaflet.2 This project only geocodes the image that the postcard maker put on the postcard, rather than where the postcards were mailed to. This is mostly because in an archive, one encounters some postcards which have been mailed and others which have not.
This approach also allows us to understand how postcard makers actively constructed place. Historians such as Cameron Blevins have explored the production space and place using text analysis and mapping to analyze nineteenth-century newspapers. Blevins accepts the notion that space is socailly constructed: it is “constitutive, ever-cahanging, and strongly tied to processes of power.” Furthermore, space is transformed into place when people “inscribe locations with meanings, values, feelings, and imaginings” through “multiple channels ranging from lived experiences to emotional attachments to acts of naming.” Building on the work of philosopher Henri Lefebvre, Blevins coins the term imagined geography, which “operates in the tradition of Lefebvre by positing the [news]paper’s geography as an active process of social construction rather than a passive reflection of the world. Newspapers print, and thereby privilege, certain places over others.” By printing the names of some places more than others, newspaper publishers reshaped how nineteenth-century Americans imagined faraway cities and towns: those that got a lot of ink seemed more connected to their own town, and those which were not mentioned often seemed more remote.3 I argue that postcard makers shaped place in this way for twentieth-century Americans and continue to influence modern perceptions of the past through the imagery they used.
Researchers generally encounter two types of postcards: mass-produced color postcards and locally-produced black and white postcards. Within the former category, “linen” postcards, so-called because of their distinctive matte finish, were churned out by huge firms such as the Curt Teich Company of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s. They began with photographs, which were then often heavily edited, colored, and printed in exaggerated hues using offset lithography to create an idealized scene. Earlier color postcards represented in this project were also mass-produced, often printed in Germany or in the U.S. by the Detroit Publishing Company using a slightly different printing process with more realistic colors. Color postcards made towards the end of our date range were called “photochrome” cards, and since these all followed a similar business model, I group them together here.4 At the same time, black and white “real photo” postcards were created by professional and amateur photographers across the country. To make one, a film or glass plate negative was printed directly onto postcard paper. These postcards often show such local scenes as train crashes, parades, or streetscapes, and were popular from about 1905 through the 1920s.5 Willard R. Ross was a real photo photographer who worked in D.C. between roughly 1910 and 1930; his work is available digitally through the DC Public Library and is a significant part of my sample.6 The interactive map below shows the locations of 77 mass-produced color and 44 black and white real photo postcards in my sample.
Figure 5: Blue pins represent real photo postcards and pink pins represent commerically mass-produced color cards. The color cards cluster in downtown D.C., while the real photo postcards capture more outlying nehghborhoods and suburbs. Zoom into the interactive map for a closer look and click on a pin to see a postcard.
The pins cluster downtown, between roughly Capitol Hill and 17th Street, NW, with particular density near the Treasury Building and McPherson Square. The presence of hotels and a much-printed view looking east from the Treasury Building towards the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue help explain this. However, neighborhoods beyond the downtown core of the city are not represented very much. This imagined geography is predominately of the downtown area. A few of the real photo postcards do break out of the downtown bubble, broadening the geography within the city north to the Old Soldiers’ Home, Rock Creek Park Cemetery, northwest to the Woodley Park neighborhood, across the river to Anacostia, and into the Maryland suburbs. Several other postcards fall outside of the District of Columbia’s boundaries. Postcards of National Airport and George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, Virginia, easily become part of D.C.’s imagined geography because the former functions as a travel gateway to the city and the latter remains a popular destination for D.C. visitors. Less understandable is a packet of souvenir postcards of Baltimore, Maryland. This packet was retrieved in my search results in the University of Maryland digital collection, and is indicative of how cataloging choices in an archive can shape imagined geographies in unexpected ways.
If a researcher can construct an imagined geography of a place, can they also take on memories of that place? Allison Landsberg has argued that twentieth-century mass culture, of which postcards were a part, made a new kind of cultural memory possible. “Prosthetic memories” are memories acquired (like a prosthetic limb which is not biologically natural but can be attached and used) by someone who did not actually live through an event, but who is experiencing or consuming some sort of cultural product, such as a museum exhibition or movie, that is about that event. This cultural product acts as an interphase or mediator between a person and the event.7 Therefore, the recipient of a postcard in 1949 or a present-day researcher thumbing through a postcard collection could conceivably form a prosthetic memory about a place that transcends geography and/or time via postcard interphase. The memories embodied in the postcards become “more widely available, so that people who have no ‘natural’ claim to them might nevertheless incorporate them into their own archive of experience.”8
Similarly, Dolores Hayden argues that places are powerful triggers of memory themselves: “Place memory encapsulates the human ability to connect with both the built and natural environments that are intertwined in the cultural landscape. It is the key to the power of historic places to help citizens define their public pasts: places trigger memories for insiders, who have shared a common past, and at the same time places often can represent shared pasts to outsiders who might be interested in knowing about them in the present.”9 The urban landscape in particular stimulates visual memory, according to Hayden, who sought to incorporate that landscape into public history projects.10 An urban landscape from 1935 may no longer physically exist, but if it was captured as a postcard, it may still stimulate a visual or prosthetic memory. Images of D.C. as capital city that show flags or federal buildings could also represent some sort of shared patriotic past.
Figure 6: This table shows the types of images that appear most often on the postcards in our sample.
We can see that the types of image pictured most often showed a streetscape, government building, or business. Far from a city of monuments, which had been one goal of city designer Pierre L’Enfant,11 this sample of postcards presents a picture of a city full of places to work, eat, or stay. The color postcard business model has something to do with this: local business proprietors seeking to advertise sent photos, fabric, or paint samples to companies like the Curt Teich Co. to print realistic, if enhanced, postcards. The proprietor of the Terrace Dining Room at National Airport did this.12 In this way local businesses actively helped to construct place.
Figure 7: Postcard showing the Terrace Dining Room at National Airport, Collection of Jerry A. McCoy
The low number of national monuments in my sample might indicate a problem with my sample, my tagging, or simply that there was a bigger audience for commercial and government architecture, and postcard producers responded accordingly. After all, in the 1930s and 1940s buildings such as the Folger Shakespeare Library, U.S. Supreme Court Building, and National Gallery of Art were all new attractions, as was Union Station at the turn of the century.13
Figure 8: Real photo postcards tended to privilege different types of images than commercially produced color postcards.
Both types of postcards show street scenes most, but real photo postcards were more apt to show scenes with people engaged in such activities as group hikes or parades; people prominently appear only once in the commercial cards. Real photos also show local, community sites like cemeteries and churches more often, whereas the commercial cards are more focused on government buildings. If examining only commercial color cards, it would be easy to construct a prosthetic memory of a beautiful but ghostly city full of empty sidewalks. Indeed, historian Jeffrey Meikle has observed that linen postcards of the 30s “portray a streamlined perfection without the grit, decay, and energy of a real city” which may have enabled the beholder to feel a sense of control of an urban landscape.14
It is important to point out, however, the people featured in the real photo postcards all seem to be white, suggesting a city divided along racial lines and documented by a white photographer. Historically black neighborhoods like LeDroit Park, U Street, and Shaw (all in the Northwest quadrant of the city) are not well represented on our map.15 According to 1940 census data available through National Historic GIS (NHGIS), the population of the city was majority white at 71.5% and 28.5% non-white. This helps explain the exclusion of non-white people in these images, but their exclusion is problematic in constructing a prosthetic memory that accurately reflects the people who lived in the city.16
Conclusion
A richly-colored linen postcard showing an empty street can, when taken as part of a larger map of postcards, shape the imagined geography of a city. If we return to the two postcards we began this article with, we see that they contribute to an imagined D.C. geography dominated by downtown buildings and streetscapes. But images like these don’t spark as strong of an emotional response as a group of active people in a real photo card. Seeing actual people in the images makes those images more relatable, potentially enabling those postcards to become stronger mediators of experience from which to create prosthetic memories of the past. Furthermore, real photo postcards were manipulated less by their makers than the commercial color ones, which lends a measure of credibility.
Figure 9: A group of people in a real photo postcard, Collection of Jerry A. McCoy
This paper has argued that postcard producers in the first half of the twentieth century privileged certain urban places over others, which shape imagined geographies, perceptions, and memories of Washington, D.C. Next, I would like to increase my sample size significantly and map those geolocations to the eight wards in the city to see which wards are most represented, and possibly compare that to census information. Using a choropleth map might prove fruitful in that analysis. Creating several map layers representing narrower time periods could be useful as well, as would limiting the focus of the type of images shown to something like memorials and monuments.
Marcus Ladd, “Printed in America: Challenging the German Monopoly in the Golden Age of Postcards,” Imprint: Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society, Vol. 41, No. 1(Spring 2017), 29 – 42, 29; For a list of mailing prices and a general chronology of American postcards, see the Smithsonian Institution Archives, “Dating Postcards,” https://siarchives.si.edu/history/featured-topics/postcard/dating-postcards, accessed May 6, 2019; John Jackle and Keith A. Scull, “The American Hotel in Postcard Advertising: An Image Gallery,” Material Culture, Vol. 37, No. 2(Fall 2005), pp. 1-25; Jeffrey L. Meikle, Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation 1931-1950 (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2015); Rosamond B. Vaule, As We Were: American Photographic Postcards, 1905-1930 (Boston: David R. Godine, 2004); John A. Jackle, Postcards of the Night: View of American Cities (Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).↩
The postcards in my sample come from two archives (The DC Public Library’s Washingtoniana Collection and the Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection at the George Washington University Museum & The Textile Museum), from a local university collection (The National Trust Library Postcard Collection at the University of Maryland), from Washington-based deltiologist Jerry McCoy’s personal collection (a deltiologist is a postcard expert and collector), and the author’s own small hobby assortment.↩
Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” The Journal of American History, June 2014: 122-148, 123-124.↩
Meikle, 2-3, 8, 15, 32. For specific information about the methods German printers and the Detroit Publishing Company used, see Marcus Ladd, “Printed in America: Challenging the German Monopoly in the Golden Age of Postcards.”↩
Vaule, 19-21.↩
The DC Public Library, “Willard R. Ross Postcard Collection,” DIGDC, https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3Aross, accessed May 1, 2019.↩
Allison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2.↩
Landsberg, 9.↩
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1995), 46. Hayden quotes Edwards Casey’s place memory theory on page 46: “It is the stabilizing persistence of place as a container of experience that contributes so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability. An alert and alive memory connects spontaneously with place, finding in it features that vapor and parallel its own activities. We might even say that memory is naturally place-oriented or at least place-supported.”↩
Hayden, 47.↩
Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 30-34.↩
The postcard design files and accompanying paint chips, photos, and other visual samples from some of these businesses can be found in the Curt Teich Postcard Archives Collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago, https://www.newberry.org/curt-teich-postcard-archives-collection. The author visited this archive and looked at the Terrace Dining Room postcard file in December 2017.↩
The Folger opened in 1932, see https://www.folger.edu/history, accessed May 5, 2019; the U.S. Supreme Court Building opened in 1935, see https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/courtbuilding.aspx, accessed May 5, 2019; the National Gallery of Art opened in 1937, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art, accessed May 5, 2019; Union Station opened in 1907, see https://www.unionstationdc.com/History-of-Union-Station/, accessed May 6, 2019.↩
Meikle, 277-279.↩
One book which documents race in D.C. is: Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). This could also be a problem in my sample: it is possible that the postcards I selected from among random webpages of the Ross Collection were of white neighborhoods and I just didn’t click on pages showing African American neighborhoods.↩